Designing for the "absent user": keeping students close to end-users during distant architectural studios

For long, architectural studios designed for advanced Master students have implemented numerous strategies to keep end-users at the core of the designed project, and to support the students through the process of learning how to design with an eye for end-users. Among those strategies, face-to-face encounters with (even a small) sample of potential end-users often reveals as a powerful way for students to open to end-users’ perspectives and needs. Unfortunately, the covid19 crisis made such encounters impossible during the 2020-21 academic year. In such impoverished pedagogical context, how could students still design for the “absent user” during their architectural studio? This paper relates an experimental setting developed to help Master students in architectural engineering re-connect with end-users, even in the absence of such end-users. Four well-known user-centric design tools have been tested and their uses and added values have been captured through focus groups conducted with the students. The results reveal how the tools can (i) act in complementary ways to re-create some of the lost link; (ii) create coherence throughout the design process and (iii) can do so even beyond the early phases of the design process, i.e. beyond the temporality where face-to-face meetings traditionally occurred in non-distant settings.